Debilitatingly Shallow

hotpot.ai/art-generator The image on the left features a focused light bulb on a table with a living room in the background. The image on the right depicts a bedroom with a large window. "Creating an image with generative AI uses as much energy as charging your phone," according to an article in MIT Technology Review from 2023. It's funny to me that the AI image generator created images of a light bulb and an empty bedroom when given the prompt "How much energy is used to create this image?" One would think that a charging phone marked as 100% would have come more easily to the generative AI. This image was created because of a prompt at the end of the Copyrights Online lecture. This week in class, we explored the concept of the public sphere. In this context, the public sphere refers to the "collective social sphere in which important conversations affecting the group freely take place." We learned about writing for the public good by utilizing ...

The most interesting thing I read in class this week was in Joyce L. Carter's  "Argument in Hypertext: Writing Strategies and the Problem of Order in a Nonsequential World."  It was about the recency effect , which refers to the phenomenon where the last thing a reader encounters is the most memorable. She wrote that "the writer might exploit the recency effect, anticipating that any node may become a conclusion for users who decide to call it quits at that spot. Stylistically, each node must sound like a conclusion." She then gave an example of a writer who "repeated key claims in every node... so that no matter which path readers took, they would see the claims repeated in various forms." That reinforced the idea that each aspect of my digital poster needs to convey the point I am trying to make, in case the reader decides to stop reading. Image credit: https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/serial-position-effect Image is of a hand-drawn graph labeled Se...

This week, we learned about Collective Intelligence and Digital Authorship , and the article that stood out to me the most was  UXMyths . The Myth noted was "people read on the web." The article, although brief, contained several links. I was able to access two of the links from Slate, but I was blocked from the Washington Post article by a paywall. I read Slate for pleasure, so I was able to make it through both articles, "Lazy Eyes" and "You Won't Finish This Article." It was at the end of  "Lazy Eyes" that I clicked the last link and was  Rickrolled .  Video is of Rick Astley singing Never Gonna Give You Up. I did finish the article " You Won't Finish This Article  ", along with at least the seventy-nine other people who commented on it. This article provided information about scrolling habits and how far into a web article most people typically scroll. The information used in the article was provided by the traffic analysis ...

  This week in Digital Writing, we explored the concept of participatory culture in social media. As I write this blog, I'm torn because I don't believe in participatory culture as it pertains to social media or the internet in general. In Module 2 - Participation and Virtual Communities, there are five examples of what a participatory culture includes: Tools that make it easy to comment and share. I agree that most social media has these tools. A community that shows support for posting and sharing. Is there a community, or is social media just a set of pseudo-social / parasocial interactions? Informal mentorship of new members. I'm not sure if I've seen informal mentorship on social media. Participants who feel their contributions matter. I can only assume that people who post think that their contributions matter, but with over 5.2 billion social media users worldwide, this seems like a naive view. Members who feel some degree of social connection with each other. ...